Lab at AOS 2023

Benjamin will be attending the American Ornithological Society conference (AOS & SCO-SOC 2023) in London, Ontario from 8-12 August 2023. Get in touch if you would like to chat during the meeting. Benjamin will be presenting research on automated acoustic monitoring of bird migration:

Listening in on social interactions during nocturnal migration
In symposium: A social perspective on songbird migration
9 August 2023 from 2:30 PM - 2:45 PM

Bird migration is one of nature's most spectacular phenomena, but migratory birds and their journeys are imperiled across the globe. Songbirds, especially those that migrate at night, are often thought to undertake migration alone. However, social interactions during nocturnal migration may play a larger role in mediating migratory decision-making than currently understood. Because many species vocalize during migratory flight, passive acoustic monitoring shows great promise for facilitating widespread monitoring of bird migration at the species and individual levels. Here, we present Nighthawk, a deep learning model designed to detect and identify the vocalizations of nocturnally migrating birds, and we use it to characterize in-flight interaction networks among migrant species. We trained Nighthawk on in-flight vocalizations from >70 migratory bird taxa, drawing on a diverse dataset of >500,000 audio clips collected across the Americas. We then applied Nighthawk to thousands of hours of passively recorded audio to identify which taxa are more likely to travel together during migration and how these relationships vary across space and time. Nighthawk is freely available software that will empower diverse stakeholders to efficiently monitor migrating birds and collect data to aid science and conservation efforts.